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I am trying to use ssh-agent to allow passphrase-less use of an ED25519 SSH key with a passphrase to sign a Git commit.

However, whenever I do a commit from command line I am asked for the passphrase every time. I believe this is a configuration issue as Visual Studio is working as expected, just not the command line or Visual Studio Code.

I am using the standard Windows environment, not Git Bash or WSL.

  • ssh-agent is setup to run on boot and verified
  • ssh-add -l shows the correct key has been added
  • I have set GIT_SSH to C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe

Git configuration-wise

  • core.sshCommand = C:/Windows/System32/OpenSSH/ssh.exe
  • signingkey is set to the key added to ssh-agent
  • commit.gpgsign = true
  • gpg.format = ssh

Screenshot of a terminal window showing the SSH configuration

OS Windows 10 22H2
Git 2.49.0.windows.1
Terminal 1.22.10731.0
PowerShell 7.5.0

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7

Signing using SSH keys does not involve ssh.exe – it uses ssh-keygen.exe.

Running Git for Windows in any way will include the "Git Bash" environment in $PATH (as, among other things, it provides tools that a few Git subcommands still require), so the ssh-keygen that's being run is the MingW OpenSSH build that doesn't know how to talk to your Win32 OpenSSH ssh-agent (the concept of "Unix sockets" was ported in two slightly incompatible ways).

You need to additionally set gpg.ssh.program to point to the correct ssh-keygen executable.

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    I used this to set gpg.ssh.program and it's now working. git config --global gpg.ssh.program (Get-Command ssh-keygen.exe).Source git config --global core.sshCommand (Get-Command ssh.exe).Source Commented Apr 17 at 9:09

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